


He That Fights With Monsters

by Flyting



Category: Ravenous (1999), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Blood, Cannibalism, M/M, Monster Kylo Ren, Soldier!Hux, Violence, Wendigo, Wendigo!Kylo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-10-19 01:26:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10629294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyting/pseuds/Flyting
Summary: W E N D I G O:a powerful creature from native american folklore. a man who consumes the flesh of another and is transformed into a monster with a fierce, insatiable hungerAssigned to isolated Fort Spencer as a backhanded promotion, Captain Hux is resigning himself to a life of quiet tedium. When a survivor of a lost wagon train tells a disturbing tale of cannibalism, Hux leads a rescue mission deep into the mountains, only to find himself hunted by a clever wendigo.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Kylux AU of the amazing cult movie _Ravenous_ , heavily inspired by how gorgeous Domhnall Gleeson was in _The Revenant._ For the ten people in the universe, who've seen Ravenous, this fic will follow the plot of the movie fairly closely, so enjoy. For those of you that haven't, check out the movie- Ravenous did homoerotic cannibalism before Hannibal made it cool.

_He that fights with monsters should look to it that he does not become a monster_

_-Frederick Nietzche_

 

1842  
Fort Spencer, California

* * *

 

  
The so-called fort is a ramshackle affair, barely deserving of the title. Little more than a cluster of rough-hewn wood and mud buildings- leaning, crumbling- huddled against each other inside a tall fence like children hiding behind their mother’s skirt. Fort Spencer cowered, at if frightened of the distant peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains which loomed on the horizon.

  
The place seemed thrown together thoughtlessly, additions tacked on without skill and as need arose. Piles of discarded lumber propped up the dirty thatch to make haphazard work shelters. Posts leaned like drunks. A few scrawny chickens wandered the yard freely, pecking at twigs on the frozen ground.

  
It was a neglected place. Unkempt and uncared-for.

  
The military brat in him, the part that- even now- folded his sheets neatly and polished all the buttons on his uniform every morning, had taken it all in with a faint sense of rising horror. There was no order. Pots and tools and washing lines hung from whatever was available. There was no sense of purpose to anything. It was hardly fit to be called an outpost of the U.S. Military.

  
It was the sort of place where you shoved the things you wanted to forget about.

  
That was, of course, why he had been sent there.

  
_“You’re no hero, Hux.”_

General Tarkin had taken him aside after Hux had disgraced himself at his own promotion ceremony, his first act as Captain being to sneak out and hide behind the building, shaking and vomiting like an addict when the sight of a too-rare steak at his own celebratory dinner had unexpectedly brought back the memory of his commanding officer’s half shot-off head.

  
The words rang like a condemnation. All of his flaws so neatly rolled into one. _You’re no hero._  
  
When he was a boy, he used to sit at his father’s knee and beg for stories from the elder Hux’s time as a commander during Madison’s War of 1812. Sitting by the fire listening to the soft lilt of his father’s voice over a cup of tea or a game of chess were some of his fondest memories, and by the time he was ten he could recite the story of each battle as well as if he’d been there himself. There had never been a time when he hadn’t pictured himself earning his own glory on the battlefield someday. All of the men in his family had been soldiers.

Naturally, Hux had been top of his class at West Point. A promising young officer. A rising star. He developed a reputation for his intelligence, his skill with battleground tactics –  moving lines of men in his mind, like chess pieces – and his tenacity. Sharp-edged ambition ensured that these traits were noticed by the right people, and he was quickly promoted to first lieutenant without ever having seen battle.

Hux had loved everything about military life, from the brutish camaraderie of his men to the bright gold braiding on his uniform.

The day he got word that he was being deployed against Santa Anna with the rest of his platoon, he had never been happier. He hoped, only, that the fighting wouldn’t be over too soon. Not before he could distinguish himself. He excelled at everything- it had never occurred to him that battle would be any different.

That younger Hux seems like a character from a book to him now. Someone he has only read about, and even then, didn’t much like.

The first time a ball had whizzed past his head close enough to ruffle his hair, Hux had frozen. Simply frozen, his knees locking up, limbs turning gelatinous with fear, as cannonshot exploded around him. The sound was deafening. A rolling boom like thunder inside his very bones. His ears rang and he tried to cover them with numb hands, but his limbs were liquid, useless- why had father never told him how loud it was-

Everything was screaming, exploding. The crack of gunshot and men dying all around him. Dirt and mud and blood- and _someone is yanking on his arm, shouting at him to get his rifle-_  
  
"Stop!"

He can’t tell which are his men and which are Santa Anna’s. Everything is moving too fast. He just needed to get his bearings, if everything would only stop-

“Move, lieutenant- Hux, come on!“

A cannonball bursts close enough that Hux’s teeth rattle, and he feels a little bit of shameful wetness seeping into the front of his wool trousers. Then he is on the ground on his knees. Scrabbling around in the muck. How did he get here-

There's a butcher's sound. The hand yanking on his arm goes slack, limp fingers clutching briefly on the woolen sleeve of his coat before the arm slithers heavily to the ground- severed. The man- _his man_ \- it had so recently been attached to is still alive. Staring up at Hux with wide, frightened eyes. His shoulder is nothing but meat, shattered by canon-shot, and the blood- _there was so much, too much, how_ \- turns the dirt under his hands and knees to warm mud-

Blue. They were blue eyes, and they remained open, staring at Hux, even after the man died.

“You’re no hero, Hux. I want you as far from my company as possible.” In private, General Tarkin’s voice was wry with scorn. The same voice which, mere hours before, had commended him in front of his father and all of his peers for ‘heroism above and beyond the call of duty’.

“I’m sending you to California- Fort Spencer.”

“Yes, sir.” Hux stood at attention, his sweat-slick hand gripping his new papers tightly. He feels that he may be sick again.

It was officially a reward. With his promotion, Hux will be second-in-command at Fort Spencer, the last military outpost west of the mountains. The papers clutched in his hand, which he had read and re-read dutifully, explain that it is a minor waypoint for travelers on their way to California, which sees little-to-no traffic in the winter, when the mountains become impassable.

“My first choice was a firing squad, you know. But seeing as how you did manage to capture the enemy post, I thought it might set a bad precedent.”

A compromise. A post where he can do no harm, and General Tarkin’s old friend Commander Hux need never know that his son is an abject coward.

“Thank you, sir.”  


It is not the praise and commendation he had dreamed of as a boy, but he has proven that he isn’t fit for anything better.

“Do you have a hobby, Hux?” There was a knife’s edge of satisfaction in the twist of the General’s mouth.

“I… Swimming, sir.” He swam sometimes in the summer, for exercise. It was close enough to a hobby. His career has always consumed the majority of his life.

“Swimming,” General Tarkin echoed, amused. “I suggest you pack a book. It gets tedious out there.”

Hux had dutifully packed three books in his case. Aristotle, his father’s dog-eared copy of ‘The Federalist’, and a James Fenimore-Cooper novel he had grabbed last-minute at the final trading post before they crossed the Nevadas.

He rations them. Doling himself out words in careful measure, the way a starving man might his last meal.

Fort Spencer thrives on tedium, Hux discovers quickly. Once the cold sets in there is little to do.

Fewer than a dozen men occupy the fort during the winter- there for seemingly no other purpose than to allow the U.S. government to state that the place is occupied year-round. His command, Hux learns quickly, consists of other men like himself- disgraces. Drunks and cowards and madmen. Human detritus that the army has swept under the rug.  
  
His commanding officer is a greying, temperamental Major named Krennic. The name is vaguely familiar from some bit of fuss involving a saboteur when Hux was a cadet.

“The Spanish built this place as a mission. We inherited it,” Krennic had informed Hux when he first arrived, tipping a few fingers of cheap bourbon into a pair of antique crystal glasses that seemed, to Hux, far too fine for the use to which they were being put. He sat gingerly in the chair across from Krennic’s sturdy desk. “Along with Phasma. She’s local. Or raised by them, anyway. I can’t imagine you got a word out of her,” he added, referring to the tall, stoic woman who had guided Hux from San Miguel to the fort.

“It’s just us until the thaw clears in April. The only enemy out here is the boredom,” he flashed a thin smile at his own joke. “Mitaka does all the cooking. Rodinon used to be a veterinarian, so he plays doctor.” Krennic drained his glass in one swallow and cleared his throat, seemingly bored already with the task of briefing his newest officer. “I would suggest you don’t get sick. I’d say don’t eat, but then most of us have to.”

“Yes, sir,” Hux said, for lack of anything better to say.

Krennic slouched indolently in his chair, one hand toying listlessly with the gold braiding at his collar, which Hux could see was frayed in several places.

“With your promotion, you’re second in command. Lucky you.”

It didn’t sound like a compliment, and so Hux did not take it as one.

Krennic poured himself a second glass of bourbon and drank it more slowly. “Can I ask what you did to earn the honor of a Fort Spencer commission?”

Hux considered lying. He sipped at his bourbon, felt the cheap sting of it in his throat. “I captured an enemy fort single-handedly, after the rest of my unit was killed,” he said finally. It was the truth.  
  
Rather than being impressed, Krennic half-smiled, like Hux had reminded him of something fond. Or perhaps told a joke without realizing it. “Ambitious. Well don’t worry, this place will soon break you of that.”

After that first day, Hux rarely sees Krennic unless the man has some onerous task to assign him, or else he has run out of bourbon. Hux cannot complain overmuch. Assuming control over the daily running of the fort provides him with some sense of purpose, however flimsy.  
  
He wastes no time in assuming the brunt of command at Fort Spencer, merely because no one else seems to want it.

  
While whipping a sense of order into the motley assortment of men there does not make him popular, it at least occupies his time.

There is a running joke at Fort Spencer. It’s, “Did you do anything today?”

He rises at dawn, polishes his boots in the pale light and pushes aside the floating chunks of ice in his wash basin to shave. Drags the rest of the men under his command, protesting, cursing, and half-dressed, out of their beds, and endures muttered comments and hateful glares from all save a stammery little lieutenant named Mitaka, who seems to fairly worship the ground Hux walks on.

It is far from how he imagined his first command.

It would be easy- too easy- to allow the seeping entropy that permeates this place to take hold of him. So Hux deploys his men to whatever petty, tedious little tasks he can find that need doing. Fortifying the main gate, gathering firewood, re-stringing the washing lines- anything he can find to give some sort of shape and purpose to the endless parade of identical days.

Save Mitaka, the men seem to think he’s a senseless little tit for trying to fight the inevitable.

They have all been here longer than he has. Sometimes, when he lies awake in the depths of the pitch-dark night, unable to sleep without dreaming, he wonders if they’re right.

Nights like that he drags himself out of his chilly, narrow bed. With a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he pads to the window and draws up the oilcloth covering so that he can look out at the distant mountains. Moonlight reflects off their snow-covered peaks, leaving them nearly luminescent. They sit crouched on the horizon, and nights like this he cannot but feel that the mountains living things and that they are watching him back.

Cold frosts his breath. Hux draws the blanket tighter around his shoulders.

 _“How did you take the fort?”_   The man had asked at his debriefing. Hux had hated him and his smooth, calm, nonjudgmental voice. He wanted to be judged.

_“When the fighting started, I panicked. I froze.”_

_“You froze?”_

_“I was...” Scared. “I laid down on the ground. I played dead.”_ He remembers the dirt in his mouth, warm, tinged with his comrade’s blood. Closing his eyes, like a child who thinks that doing so will somehow make him invisible.

_“You played dead while the rest of your unit fought and died.”_

_“Yes.”_

_“But you made it behind enemy lines.”_

_The words stuck in his throat. “I was buried.”_

A mass grave. His commanding officer’s half shot-off head inches from his face. The crushing weight of dead men piled on top of him. Blood and other filth covering him. The taste of lukewarm blood in his mouth, choking him, running down his throat-

 _“I climbed out once it got dark.”_ Pushing aside the dead weight of men twice his size like they weighed nothing. Covered in muck and gore as he climbed from an open grave, the first guard who had seen Hux had simply dropped his rifle in fear and bolted.

_“And how did you take the post?”_

How to describe that rush of power? The sudden influx of energy, like being possessed, and yet more in control of himself than he had ever been before. Predatory. Fierce.  


It had been the adrenaline, surely.  


* * *

 

 Time passes in a listless trickle of days. Hux oversees the fort, dodging Mitaka’s earnest attempts to get underfoot, and the baleful curses of the rest of his men, who, never the cream of the crop in the first place, had grown lazy and indolent under Krennic’s lax hand.  
  
“No side trips. Go straight to San Miguel and back,” Hux refuses to relinquish his hold on the supply list until their errand boy, a particularly addle-brained young private named Cleeves, meets his stare. The man shifts and slouches on the back of his horse- one of their two broken down old nags, the other currently being ridden by Phasma- rolling his eyes like a teenager being lectured by his father and trying halfheartedly to twist the paper out of Hux’s hand.  
  
“I know what I’m supposed to be doing, goddamn-” he complains, in a thick southern accent.  
  
“Get exactly what’s on the list, nothing more, nothing less, you hear me? No dawdling. No drinking. No women,” Hux adds firmly, releasing the paper. He tempers the urge to smack the man off his horse, knowing it would only make him more enemies.  
  
“Aww, come on-“  
  
“I’ll watch him,” Phasma says in her low, calm voice. She is swaddled up in grey furs, looking infinitely more comfortable in the frigid winter air than he is in his woolen greatcoat. Rumor around the fort was that they came from a wolf which she had killed bare-handed. Looking at her, it was not a difficult story to believe.  
  
“Thank you, Phasma.”  
  
Hux lifts the crossbeam off of the main gate and pulls open the doors just enough for their horses to pass through.  
  
Ironic, the woman had proven herself to be the only one of them worth a damn. Hux would have gladly traded his entire command for another of Phasma. The next week without her will be torment, but Hux doesn’t trust Cleeves to find his own prick with both hands, let alone make it two days overland with all their shopping intact, and this will be the last supply run they have time for before the winter snow well and truly cuts them off.  
  
On top of that, he had asked Phasma to pick him up another book.  
  
Hux reads by light of a single candle in the frozen evening hours, always with a blanket pulled up over his shoulders to ward off the chill that seeps into every corner no matter how much straw he stuffs into the cracks in his walls. He has finished the Aristotle and the Fenimore-Cooper and is dawdling over a re-read of The Federalist, hoping to make it last until Phasma returns with reinforcements, when the cold finally chases him out of his solitary room and into the warmer mess building, where the men stay up late in the evenings conversing, smoking, and warming themselves besides the big fireplace.  
  
If there is an epicenter of culture at Fort Spencer, it is the mess hut. He’s made a habit of absenting himself, aware of his own unpopularity, but even he isn’t stubborn enough to lose his toes just to avoid a bit of social awkwardness. Hux bundles himself up in his greatcoat, book under his arm, and crosses the frozen ground at a quick clip. His leather boots are unlined- made for the much warmer climate of New Mexico. There should be a new pair coming back with Phasma and Cleeves.

It has started to snow again, and flecks of it land in his copper hair and on the shoulders of his coat like stars. When he opens the mess door, the wind picks up, forcing a burst of flurries inside with him before he forces it shut.

To Hux’s surprise, his arrival barely stirs a grumble out of the half-dozen men lounging around the fireplace. There are a couple of amused mutters, Private Reich drawls, “Well look who decided to join us,” and that is the end of it.

Major Krennic is the only one who isn’t in the mess, but Hux isn’t surprised. Hux had seen the low light burning in his window as he crossed the square. Considering the hour, he was probably drunk.

Mitaka, who seems to be losing badly at chess with Rodinon, lights up when he notices Hux and he offers a breathless, “Evening, Captain-“ Rodinon takes advantage of his distraction to nudge Mitaka’s rook a few squares to the side.

Hux nods to them, but says nothing, holding his book in his hands like a shield against unwelcome questions. He finds a chair close enough to the fire that he can warm his frozen toes and sinks into it. The book is held open in his lap, but he only gazes at the page, unseeing. He only has a few dozen pages left of The Federalist, and it needs to last him the remainder of the week... In the quiet dark up here in the mountains, reading is the only defense he has to keep the memories at bay.

It’s a balancing act- reading a few sentences at a time, considering them as he watches the snowstorm pick up through the mess hut’s single low window, and returning to his pages before his mind can wander all the way back to New Mexico, and the pit of his comrades bodies that is waiting for him every night when he closes his eyes.

  
In between pages, he watches the men around him, surreptitiously, idly wondering what sins they committed to earn a sentence in this purgatory.

Rodinon was a cheat and a liar. The absent Cleeves was a fool. Mitaka had dropped his entire life story at Hux’s feet at the first prompting- he had been General Tarkin’s aide de camp until he spilled tea all over the man’s desk. The others Hux doesn’t know, but can guess.

How many of them had tried to escape the world, only to turn back around and try to escape this bleak, awful place?

Outside the window, the snow had begun to fall in thick drifts, and so Hux gazes aimlessly out into the night for long moments before he realizes, with a sudden jolt of fear, that something is gazing back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end notes for content warnings.

“Get him inside- inside, quickly!”  
  
The man staring in the window is tall and gaunt, with strips of bloodied, frozen linen wound around his feet and ice crusting his unkempt dark hair and beard. Rodinon and Thanisson half drag, half carry him into the mess hut. He is shivering, insensate. Barely alive. Cold has sunk deep into the dark woolen coat wrapped around his lean frame.

“We need hot water and blankets. And go and inform Major Krennic!” Hux barks.  
  
“Yes, sir!” Mitaka stumbles, scrambles to obey.  
  
“Christ, how long has he been out there?” Rodinon asks. “He’s cold as ice.”

They get the stranger into a hot bath and try to work some blood back into his frozen feet and hands, which he clutches close to his chest like claws. Eventually the muscles relax, but the shivering intensifies as life returns to bone-white limbs.  
  
“W- we-“ the man struggles to speak around the chattering of his teeth. Even his lips are pale, bloodless.

“It’s alright, rest now.”  
  
“W- w- where-“

“You’re at Fort Spencer. California. What’s your name?” Hux asks.  
  
“B-ben… help, p-please…”

It is the last word they get out of him before he succumbs to a heavy sleep.

Was he a hunter or fur trader who had gotten lost in the mountains? Or perhaps some wagon train had become stranded. It wasn’t unheard of, Rodinon told him, when reckless guides tried to beat the onset of winter in the race to a safe haven and lost. The rags tied around his boots were tattered with frozen blood. How long had he been walking, out there alone in the cold?

A pallet is made up beside the fireplace in the mess hut, piled high with spare blankets and furs, and Hux’s own greatcoat. He remains there through the night. They take turns keeping vigil, like mourners, but he seems to sleep peacefully. Miraculously, the cold seems to have done no permanent damage beyond a slight chill that lingers beneath the skin no matter how they try to warm him.

Hux fingers the edges of the book in his lap as he keeps watch over the young man. Dark hair and pale skin. Resting beside the fire with his damp hair curling around his face and dark lashes resting on his cheeks, Ben looks like something out of a fairy tale. Lacking only a kiss from a lovely young maiden to awaken him.

The snow worsens through the night.

It feels as though Hux’s shift at the mysterious young man’s bedside has just ended- surely he had crawled into bed and closed his eyes only minutes ago- when he is awakened by Mitaka banging on his door in a flutter of excitement.  
  
“Captain! Captain, he’s awake!”

Hux groans into his pillow.

He dresses with haste if not enthusiasm, pulling on his too-thin boots to tromp out into the thick snow covering the yard. In the night it had fallen thick and fast enough to coat everything in a gleaming field of pristine white that crunches under his feet.

He first cuts a path to the Major’s hut, but Krennic is more interested in the warmth of his bed and the contemplation of a sick basin than in their new arrival, shouting through the door for Hux to fuck off and not to disturb him again for anything less than a corpse 

“Is the Major coming?” Mitaka asks earnestly when Hux steps into the mess hut alone.

“Major Krennic has directed me to handle this situation,” Hux replies stiffly. He hears snickering and a mutter of, “Too much bourbon in his bourbon?” from within the handful of men gathered around. Hux cuts a glare at them as he passes.

The man who said his name was Ben is sitting up beside the fire. Stripped of his tattered, ice-encrusted clothes, he has Hux’s greatcoat draped over his bare shoulders. He’s a large man, and broad-shouldered, but lean, with wiry arms and a narrow waist. As if he’d lost a great amount of weight in a short amount of time. Large hands twist idly in the blankets gathered over his lap.

“How are you feeling?” Hux asks, taking a seat across from him.

“Better, thank you.” His voice is soft, but deeper than Hux is expecting.

“Shall we start with your name?”

“Benjamin Organa-Solo. Ben,” he corrects. “I’m a student at the seminary in Fort Wayne, Missouri. Thank you,” Ben adds earnestly when Mitaka passes him a bowl sloshing with a watery stew. He gulps it down, still steaming, like a starving man. When he reaches out his arm for the bowl, Hux notices a wooden rosary dangling from his wrist.

“How long were you out there, Ben?”

“I’m not sure,” he says in between ravenous gulps. “Three months? Maybe four.”

“Without food?” Mitaka interjects.

Ben pauses, hesitant with his answer. “Yes.”

Wordlessly, Mitaka accepts the empty bowl back and scuttles off to fill it again. When Ben has gulped down another helping, practically swallowing the soggy root vegetables and chunks of over-boiled chicken whole, Hux prompts him again.

“You said you were out there three months without food. How are you still alive?”

Ben bites his lip, “I… I said no food, I didn’t say there was… nothing to eat.”

For a moment, the only sound is the wind howling outside the hut. The fire crackles. It casts an eerie, orange glow over Ben’s uneven face.

“I suppose I owe you the truth,” Ben says. He closes his dark eyes, briefly.

“We left in April, out of Saint Louis- my uncle Luke, my cousin Rey, and myself. And five others. Two men from New York- Dameron and Finn. Professor Saint-Tekka, from… Sweden, I think.” Ben pauses. “And our guides. An older man named Snoke, and his servant Ren.”

“I don’t know any guides named Snoke, not on this route...” Rodinon says. He had been at Fort Spencer the longest out of all of them.

“Better for you,” Ben says. There is an empty, haunted look in his eyes. “He was an awful man. And a worse guide. He told us he knew a secret, shorter route through the mountains. That he would get us there in half the time. We trusted him… even when he lead us far off the known path.”

A feeling like dread settles in the pit of Hux’s stomach.

“The route he lead us on was impossible. Twisting through the mountains. We tried so hard… lightened the wagons as much as we could. But at the first snowfall we were still more than a hundred miles from this place. That was months ago. Snoke said we had no choice but to take shelter in a cave and wait for the storm to pass. But after three weeks, the trail only became worse- more impassable. And we had run out of food.”

Ben sucks in a shaky breath, fingers tracing blindly over the rosary around his wrist. “We ate the oxen, the horses… even Dameron’s dog.”

Mitaka makes a low, dismayed sound.

“That lasted us about a month. After that it was our belts. Our boots. Any roots that we could dig up, but there wasn’t much- it was so cold. We were starving.”

Hux suddenly finds that he cannot meet Ben’s black-eyed gaze. The remembered taste of copper fills his mouth- he suddenly knows where this story will end, god, _he knows_ -

“When Professor Saint-Tekka died, my uncle and I were out gathering firewood. He had starved to death. And when we got back, the others were cooking his legs for dinner…”

“Oh, god…” Reich groans.

Hux presses a hand over his mouth to keep the taste of bile down.

“I like to think I could have stopped it, if I’d been there,” Ben is breathing hard, as if on the verge of tears. “But I don’t know. My uncle railed at Snoke for allowing it, but even he gave in, eventually- it seemed a godsend, and Rey was so hungry…”

Hux pictures them there- starving, hollow-faced men and woman clustered around a pitiful fire in the dark of the cave. The smell of meat cooking.  
  
Would he have stopped them?

Ben drags the heel of his palm over his eyes. Steadies his voice, and Hux forces himself to look up. “We ate sparingly. Others did not. Snoke, in particular, was always hungry…”

“The…” he swallows, “meat didn’t last a week. And we were all hungry again, but this time it was different.” He meets Hux’s eyes. “Worse. More… predatory.”

Ben’s mouth twists into a bitter frown, “My uncle was the first one they killed. Snoke said that he slipped on the ice and broke his neck. I would almost have believed it, if not for Ren’s handprints on his skin. And once he was dead what could we do? We were starving. "

“By the time they killed Dameron, they weren’t even bothering to hide it anymore.”

“Dear god.”

“That left five of us. Snoke and Ren, my cousin Rey, Finn, and myself. Finn and I knew that one of us would be next, so we drew lots after the others were asleep… One of us to go for help. The other to stay and try to protect Rey.” He makes an empty sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “I won.”

“Are they still up there?” Hux asks him. “Finn and your cousin?”

“Snoke and Ren too. As far as I know. Please- you have to help me. You’re soldiers… you have to help me save them.”

There’s a low muttering from his men, an edge of fear. Hux feels a frisson of it himself, after Ren’s story. Snoke and Ren seem, in his mind, like monsters from a children’s story, all teeth and shadows. He half-imagines he hears a brittle laugh, like the rattle of dry leaves.

“Please. I’ll go back myself if you won’t.” Ben says again, entreating with his dark eyes suddenly full of fire. He hunches his bare shoulders under Hux’s coat, gripping it tight around him in the low light.

He forces himself to be reasonable. It was an old man and his servant- terrifying, perhaps, when you were weak and starving, hemmed in by ice, but no match for half a dozen armed soldiers, even if they were Fort Spencer stock. And this man needed their help.

_You’re no hero, Hux._

* * *

_  
_

Hux informs Major Krennic that he is taking four men with him at first light to render assistance to a trapped wagon party. It is not, technically speaking, a lie, and Krennic does not care enough to press him for details. 

That night Hux has nightmares about the cave, gaping open like a hungry mouth waiting to swallow him up. _The smell of meat cooking. Lukewarm blood in his mouth, running down his throat._

 _He is back in the pit again, but now it’s Ben’s corpse weighting him down. His shattered skull, inches from his face. His eyes are open, but they are sky-blue, not black, staring at him in the warm darkness, and Ben’s corpse laughs-_  
  
His stomach roils, tight and anxious with fear like the coward that he is, as he busies himself with assembling their provisions the next day. Rodinon and little Thanisson will accompany him, as well as Reich and Mitaka. He wishes Phasma was coming, but she won’t return from San Miguel for several days yet. To delay could cost lives.

When his men assemble at the gate- shuffling, half-awake, unkempt, but there without complaint- Hux is very nearly proud of them.

“What are you doing?” he frowns when he notices that Ben is among them, wearing a pair of borrowed boots and adjusting the straps on his pack. He has shaved and combed his ragged hair, revealing uneven but strangely boyish features.

“I’m coming with you,” he says, as if it were obvious. Before Hux can open his mouth to deny him, to say that it isn’t necessary, Ben insists, “I have to- you’ll never find them without me.”

Ben proves an adept tracker. Despite having been insensate and half-frozen, he remembers the path from the cave well.

“It’s on the other side of this ridge,” he says as they strain their backs on the foothills of the Nevadas. Hux’s men grumble and his legs burn from the steady climb uphill, but they make steady progress. “A day or more’s walk northeast, near a river.”

Aside from pointing out directions, Ben smiles and laughs with the rest of the men, but otherwise says little. Lost in his own thoughts. Hux catches him once in quiet conversation with Thanisson, who is their youngest, fresh-faced and barely more than a cadet at twenty, when they stop to rest. Ben is showing Thanisson the rosary looped around his wrist, fingers brushing lightly over the little beads. “-you do that once for each, and then the Hail Mary-”

Something about it makes Hux’s blood sour with something that feels uncomfortably like jealousy. It’s a nasty feeling. Selfish. A bitterness that this man should remain so disgustingly sweet and unstained after what he had done.

 _The taste of blood, like copper, in his mouth._  
  
It was unfair. He should be marked by it, broken, blackened in some noticeable way. Instead it feels as though Ben were flaunting his purity in Hux’s face.

“Break’s over. Come on, let’s get a move on.” Hux calls out, spitefully. His words are met with groans and scattered complaints. Ben tucks the rosary back into his sleeve and parts from Thanisson with a smile and an earnest clap on the boy’s narrow shoulder.

To his surprise, as they wind out of a thatch of trees and onto an exposed mountain ridge, Hux finds Ben keeping pace with him. For long hours neither of them speak. The uneven rock beneath then is frosted with snow- a treacherous walk. One mis-placed step could send a man tumbling. Hux concentrates on putting one foot in front of him.

“I ought to thank you,” Ben says eventually, eyes on his boots and the slippery ground beneath. “For helping me. For letting me come along.”

 “You were right- we wouldn’t stand a chance of finding the cave otherwise,” Hux says with distant civility.

“Still. You have no idea how grateful I am.”

They walk in silence. There is a question hovering on the tip of his tongue. Something that has been lurking, quiet and heavy in his chest since Ben had told them his story. An explanation for something that perhaps Ben can provide.

“May I ask you something? About… what happened in the cave.”

Hux waits for a sound of assent before he continues. “You said that after you ate that man, your hunger was different. What did you mean?”

Ben is quiet for so long, watching him in the fading evening light, that Hux thinks he might have overstepped propriety. “It felt… wanton. Like I would do anything to satisfy it. Like I _could_ do anything.”

“You felt stronger.”

His voice is low, almost loving, “Stronger. More powerful. It was like I wasn’t myself, but-“

“-you were more in control of yourself than you’ve ever been.” Hux finishes. His mouth is dry.

_How did you take the fort?_

_I don’t know. I don’t know-_  
  
"Yes."

Ben watches him closely, and in the fading light, his soft eyes suddenly seem dark and fathomless as the night sky. Hux can feel them on his skin long after he looks away.

He is eventually roused from his numb reverie by a shout from up ahead. Mitaka has slipped on a patch of loose snow and tumbled perhaps a dozen feet down the ridge. He is alive, but bleeding heavily from a gash across his calf where the sheer rock face had split him open. Hux watches the scene distantly, feeling like he’s been doused in ice water- Mitaka’s shouting, the loose snow where he had fallen, red blood staining the pristine white beneath him.  
  
_Blood on the snow, on his face, in his mouth-_  
  
It is several moments before Hux realizes that everyone is looking to him for orders. He drags his eyes away from the bright smear of blood on the snow. His mouth opens and closes a few times, his mind like a clockwork that has ground to a halt at the sight of _all that blood-_  
  
“Captain?” Rodinon prompts.

Awareness returns back to him in a rush. “Get- get a rope.” It is easier once he begins moving, the actions of command coming back to him slowly, and their momentum carrying him forward. The ridge is far too steep to climb down. They will have to lower a rope, and- “Rodinon, get bandages and see if you can find something for a splint. Thanisson-“

They lower the rope down to Mitaka, and Hux and Thanisson and Reich together succeed in pulling him, hand over hand, up the sheer rock face.

Ben watches Hux the entire time.

* * *

 

  
They camp that night on the ridge, clearing away enough snow to make room for their narrow tent and sleeping close together in the darkness. Mitaka’s wound isn’t deep, but it is jagged and bleeds heavily. Hux finds excuses to wait outside of the tent, unable to abide the sharp copper smell of it, until they’ve managed to staunch the bleeding and poured enough whiskey down Mitaka’s throat to get him to sleep through the pain.

Hux lies awake late into the night, listening to the warm, living sounds of breathing, snoring, inside the tent. When he finally sleeps, he dreams of blood and snow, and Ben’s voice. _I would do anything to satisfy it. I could do anything-_

He is awakened by shouting. Scuffling at the back of the tent.

“What’s going on?” Hux demands, his voice sharp in the darkness.

“Get him off me! Get off!” Mitaka is nearly screaming. Reich and Rodinon have Ben pinned between them, his hands wrenched behind his back. His eyes are black, pupils fat in the dim light of Thanisson’s lantern, and Hux can see that there’s a bright smear of still-wet blood on his lower lip.  
  
“What happened?”

Mitaka is shaking, his face pale. As if in shock. He mumbles something, barely more than a whisper. Someone had torn the bandaging off his injured leg, and he presses both hands to it to stop the bleeding, which has started afresh.

“Lieutenant,” Hux barks. “ _What happened?”_  
  
“He was-“ Mitaka cringes away from Ben, hands still curled protectively over his wound. His face is twisted up in something like disgust.  “He was _licking_ me.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains: mentions of survival cannibalism, gore, blood, implied canon character death.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: lots of blood, some gore, discussion of cannibalism, and Hux has a lot of PTSD flashbacks. 
> 
> Also, a moment I know a lot of my fellow Ravenous fans have been waiting for. Hopefully I did it justice!

“You have to believe me, I didn’t- _I was having a nightmare_.” There was still a smear of Mitaka’s blood on Ben’s fat lower lip. It caught the wavering light of Thanisson’s lantern, obscenely wet, impossible to look away from. “I was having a nightmare. Oh, God... I woke up on top of him, my mouth was on his- on his wound.”

Ben retched and began to cry with loud, sticky sobs. “Oh God, oh God forgive me. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to.”

His tears were drowned out by Mitaka’s shrieking. “You’re sick. Sick!” The young lieutenant was shrill with terror, like a wounded animal in the dark, long past logic or sense. Under the circumstances, Hux couldn’t fault him overmuch. “Sick man! Keep away from me! Get him away!”

Hux recoiled a cowardly half-step back in the crowded tent when Ben surged towards him, arms outstretched. His eyes were wide and dark. “Tie me up! Captain please, I can’t be trusted. You have to restrain me!”

They bind his hands.

When the first timid fingers of light creep into the sky, Hux could still hear Ben crying to himself, occasionally undercut with Mitaka’s whimpering night terrors. As dawn breaks, sunrise smears the horizon with red, like the blood on Ben's slick lip.

When they break camp just past dawn the next morning, few of them having slept, his men seem to do everything they can to avoid looking at Ben Solo. His undershirt is dirty and his hair wild from sleeping on the bare ground outside the tent, where he had been banished. His eyes are rimmed with red as he wanders the campsite like an exile, or perhaps a ghost, until Reich beckons him over with a whistle.

“You come within five feet of me and you’re getting my boot in your balls,” Reich says, looping a torn-off length of rope through the cord around Ben’s bound wrists. He tugs it, experimentally, like a dog’s leash. “Understood, friend?”

Ben nods, mute. He looks wretched.

When Ben turns, feeling the weight of eyes on him, Hux turns sharply to avoid his gaze. He ducks his head and focuses on dismantling their cloth and tack four-man tent. The stakes need to be pulled up, thin cord carefully wound up to prevent it from tangling. Hux prefers to do this sort of task himself rather than entrusting it to his men. This is what he tells himself.

Having camped high on the mountain they must now begin the arduous journey of descent into thick, old growth valley. The trees here are towering, as if they’re rising up to meet them. Monstrous. Once they descend, Hux feels them looming over him, their branches heavy with snow. Some of the trees they pass are wider than the span of his arms.

Hux had grown up in and around the Chesapeake Bay, with its dense underbrush and tangled wetland forests, but this terrain is another beast altogether. It is like a nightmare version of the forests of his childhood- the mountains steeper, more jagged. The shadows are deeper. Unfamiliar creatures chatter and rustle around them.

Still, it smells fresh and clean, and he tells himself that there is nothing to fear. He’s a soldier, not a lost child from a fairy tale, and there are people in these woods who need his help.

This is pristine land, and they are cutting path through the thin underbrush with every downhill step. It is easiest to walk in almost single-file. Reich takes the lead, dragging Ben a half-dozen paces behind him with every outward sign of relish. He whistles while he walks, a cheerful tune, occasionally pausing to click his tongue at Ben on his leash, yanking at the rope like he is guiding a reluctant dog.

Their guide, for his measure, does not object to the demeaning treatment. He seems lost in his own mind, eyes downcast. Hux wonders what he’s thinking.

Rodinon comes behind, giving Ben wide berth. Hux. Mitaka and Thanisson make up the rear of their little party.

They had found a sturdy branch to serve Mitaka as a crutch until they can get him back to the fort, and Thanisson hovers near him like a skinny mother hen, occassionally settling a hand low on his back for balance. Hux can hear the two of them talking.

The only other sounds are Reich whistling up ahead, and the incessant chirping, humming, living noises of the forest around them.

“What does that mean?” Hux asks Thanisson and Mitaka while they walk, the second time he hears an unfamiliar term whispered between them. He wraps his mouth the word carefully, “Wendigo? I’ve never heard that term before.”

There’s a moment of hesitation before Mitaka answers, “Phasma told us about them, sir.”

“What are they?”

“It’s nothing, sir. Just a story,” Thanisson says, shooting Mitaka a warning look before he can open his mouth. Thanisson is young, but he has a collected air about him. Had he not been sacrificed to Fort Spencer, Hux imagines the boy would have made a respectable officer one day. “Some sort of local monster. Nothing more than a heathen legend.”

The last is directed at Mitaka, chiding.

“In the village where she was raised, they believed that if a man...” Mitaka lowers his voice. His eyes flit to Ben Solo’s back. “ _Ate_ another man, during a bad winter or a famine or something, he would gain the other man’s strength. It would make him stronger and faster, but it would change him.”

Something cold trickles down Hux’s spine.

“Changed how?”

“It turned him into this sort of monster- a wendigo _,"_ he whispers. "They're always hungry, sir. Forever. They would cast them out in the woods, because once they’ve done it they can never get enough. Phasma says that if you’re in the woods at night you can hear them howling-”

“I should hope,” Hux interrupts, tongue thick in his mouth, “That two grown men would know better than to believe in that sort of thing.”

“Yes, sir,” Thanisson answers dutifully. “It’s just a legend, like I said. Although... it is rather strange, isn’t it?” The quick dart of his eyes leaves no doubt as to what- who- he is talking about.

“To be forced into that situation is a terrible tragedy, it’s nothing to be made light of.”

Mitaka says, “But he said it himself, didn’t he, that he felt hungrier afterwards? What if-”

“It’s nonsense!” Hux snarls, turning. “Being forced, by desperate circumstances beyond your control to- to consume another human being is traumatic. I should damn well hope it changes you! If someone behaves strangely afterwards, it doesn’t mean that they’re _cursed_!” He spits the word out, feeling it strike against his teeth. Mitaka’s face is pale, either from blood loss or surprise.

Slowly, he becomes aware that every other sound in the forest has died away. Reich has stopped whistling. They are all staring at him, and Hux’s fury dies as quickly as it was kindled. He breathes shallowly, suddenly feeling as if he’s run the last mile.

Rodinon sucks his teeth. Thanisson swallows, heavy, his shoulders hunched as if to bear the weight of his captain’s sudden outburst.

Even Solo has stopped to watch him, his dark eyes curious.

“Why have we stopped? Keep moving.” Hux forces the words out, feeling his cheeks flame. Hitching his rifle higher in a pathetic attempt to hide his embarrassment, he pushes forward, shouldering past Rodinon.

“Yes, sir,” Reich says, not bothering to hide the disdain in his tone.

For the next few hours Hux takes the lead. He moves as though trying to escape a pursuer, cutting a jagged path through massive trees towards the distant sound of running water, allowing himself to be tugged along by gravity until he is nearly running. It’s not the judgmental whispers darting along behind him that he’s running from. He’s never had their favor before. He reminds himself he doesn’t need it now.

It’s his own terror he’s trying to shake.

_It was as if the world had shrunk down to the even beat of his own heart, the rush of his own blood thick in his ears, throbbing underneath his skin. His grip on the enemy’s gun is slick with sweat and other things as he approaches the Mexican sentries from behind. The only sound is his own breathing, sharp but steady. He isn’t afraid._

_Two quick shots. The second one turns, too slow, and the bullet catches him in the face, shattering his jaw. Hux watches him drop. The air is alight with the scent of gunpowder and blood. He isn’t afraid._

_He takes their guns. Brisk. Calm. The second man is still alive, sucking air through the wet hole in his face, and he pushes weakly at Hux with a short knife. Hux pulls it from his hands easily and slits his throat. Warm blood splatters across his face, catching in his mouth. He licks his lips._

_He isn’t afraid._

_He’s..._

Why, then, does it feel as if he’s going the wrong way?

  
The forest seems to grow quiet as they approach the river. Even the insects are silent here. It’s eerie, almost. Unnaturally still. It’s almost midwinter and ice has gathered around the banks, but the water moves too quickly, rushing over the rocks, to freeze. At a glance, it is less than knee-deep, but fast and uneven enough to be treacherous.

Hux waits for the others to catch up by the riverbank. He squares his shoulders, breathes deeply through his nose until his lungs burn from the chill in the air. He imagines it freezing his insides- his panic, his fear, everything, until he is calm inside and out. The rest of his party exits the treeline slowly, in ones and twos.

Cold air frosts his breath in front of his face as he takes in the area. The water continues its journey downhill to his right. On the opposite bank, the ground begins to incline again, sloping sharply upwards into a towering pile of rock, cragged and uneven, that is nevertheless only the foothill of the greater Sierra Nevadas. It’s rock and shale here, for perhaps the twenty feet between the forest and the river, and the ground is curiously free of snow.

Hux turns to Ben when he approaches. “Which way?”

Ben blows out a shaky breath, gesturing to their left. “Uphill. That way. We’re not far. It’s just on the other side of the river. Maybe a hundred yards.”

“You’re sure?” Reich says.

“Yeah- yes. Yes.” Ben takes a deep breath. Then another.

“You don’t have to come any further,” Hux says without looking at him, something close to gentle. “We can take it from here.”

“No, no- I want to. I have to.”

“Right then- we’ll leave everything here. No sense lugging it uphill. Check your guns.”

Each soldier carried a standard Springfield musket, in various states of working order, what Hux privately thought of as Fort Spencer Ready, in addition to any personal sidearms. Hux had his father’s pistol. Reich had taken it a step further, tucking a hunting knife into his boot, in addition to his musket and what looked like a revolver in his belt.

“What about me? Shoudn’t I get a- I mean,” Ben asks, fidgeting with his rosary as he watched them. “Ren could be in there, what do I do if-”

“Run,” Mitaka suggests, uncharacteristically hard.

“Right. Sorry, sorry.”

“It won’t come to that,” Hux says.

Ben swallows. “No, no of course not.”

“Come on, lets get this over with,” Rodinon says.

 

They cross the freezing river, heading uphill.

No one speaks. The sound of water rushing past drowns out their clumsy approach; all of them save Reich stumbling on loose rock, Mitaka limping along in the rear.

“Oh God,” Ben whimpers suddenly. The rope around his wrists pulls taut and Reich loops it around his hand to drag him forward. Ben struggles, digging in his heels, and Hux follows his gaze up to a low outcropping of rock ahead and to their right.

“Oh God, _oh God_ -” Ben’s voice trails off to a frightened whimper.

Just visible over the lip of the outcropping is the mouth of a cave.

It is smaller than in Hux’s nightmares. The triangular opening is perhaps the height of a man and as wide as the span of his arms, crouched back on a sort of porch made of relatively flat stone. Inside is darkness.

_We had no choice but to take shelter in a cave..._

“Is that it?” Thanisson asks.

“I assume so,” Hux says.

Ben is whining, a steady, “No, no, no, no-” He’s shaking, panicking, trying to cross himself with his bound arms. His eyes are fixed on the dark opening like it is the mouth of a predator about to swallow him up. “He’s going to- oh God please, no, _don’t let them get me_ \- please don’t let them get me-” His normally low voice has gone sharp, childish. He sucks in uneven, hitching breaths. Whimpers. “I can’t... _no- no, please_ -” Words trail off into incoherent sobs.

“Come on.” Reich tries to drag him forward by the lead, yanking at his bound arms. The rope strains, creaks, but Solo is a large man and he is frozen, absolutely immobile with terror.

_“No! No!”_

“He’s spooked,” Hux mutters. “Let him go.”

When the cord holding him is tossed away in disgust Ben Solo stumbles, retreats a dozen paces until his back hits the rock behind them, where he crouches, folding himself small like a frightened child. His eyes never leave the opening of the cave.

“Right,” Hux raises his voice to be heard over the rush of water and Ben’s frightened babbling. His own heart is pounding in his chest. Ben’s fear is infectious- Thanisson has started to squirm, darting looks between the frightened man and the mouth of the cave.

“You two watch him,” Hux says to Thanisson and Mitaka, making his voice as hard as he can. To Rodinon he adds, “Lieutenant, I want you at the mouth of the cave. Shoot anything that comes out that isn’t Private Reich or myself.”

“You coming in with me, Captain?” Private Reich says. There’s a smug smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

_He doesn’t think I can do it._

Spite goes a long measure towards helping Hux swallows his fear down, where it sits, a slippery, uneasy knot, in the middle his belly.

“Of course. You need an officer in there.”

Reich takes the lantern and the lead, and Hux is quietly, pitifully grateful. Though his voice is firm, he’s unable to get the shaking of his hands under control.

“ _Hello_?” Reich calls into the gaping darkness. “ _Anybody home_?”

Silence echoes back at them.

A sucking rush of air ruffles Hux’s unwashed, shoulder-length hair as they step inside. _Caves breathe_ , he remembers his father telling him once. The bigger the cave, the deeper it breathes.

The passage they’re in narrows just inside and they are obliged to move in single file. Hux keeps his gun at the ready. His palms are slick with sweat. He is suddenly, acutely aware of the fact that he has not held a musket since New Mexico.

His hands were slick then too. Not just with sweat.

Reich stops. Speaks, and it takes Hux a moment to parse that he has said, “Can you not point that thing right at my back, please?”

Awareness rushes back at him, shame at his own lapse in basic form with it, and Hux shoulders his musket.

“Let’s go,” he says briskly to cover his own embarrassment.

 

  
Outside, Rodinon calls, “Can one of you shut him up? I can’t hear.”

Ben Solo has taken the rosary off his wrist and started to pray, still crouched on the ground with his hands bound in front of him. He is breathing rabbit-quick, words tumbling over themselves in a confused mess. A litany of fear. Thanisson looks away, embarrassed.

Near Ben’s feet, something buried in the dirt gleams.

   


Just inside the cave they find the remnants of a campfire and a pair of bedrolls. Hux keeps his gun up, eyes twitching through the darkness for any sign of life, while Reich rifles through the nearest pile of canvas blankets. They’re stiff where frost has sunk deep into them. Unused for ages.

The fire is the same. Long-cold, little more than ash.

Reich rises, dusting his hands off on his pants. “Maybe they left.”

“There are only two,” Hux notices.

What had become of Ben’s cousin and the man from New York?

“Hey, there’s some kind of hole up here.” Reich moves aside so that Hux can join him in a low corner of the cave. When he gets there, he’s obliged to duck his head.

In the dirty lantern-light, the chamber they’re in is perhaps a dozen feet long and half that in width. In the far corner, below an overhang, there is a wide black pit leading downwards. The light does not penetrate it.

Reich looks at him. “After you, Captain.”

   


  
“Anything?” Mitaka asks. He hobbles closer to the mouth of the cave, leaning on his crutch. Rodinon shakes his head.

“Do you think she’s still alive?” Thanisson asks quietly. “That girl.”

He has seated himself on the edge of the flat porch of rock that juts out from the cave entrance, close enough to listen to what they’re saying, but where he can see Ben Solo if he turns his head. His gun is laid on the rock beside him.

Mitaka limps over to stand beside him and slowly lowers himself down, keeping pressure off of his injured leg. “Reich and the Captain will save her,” he says.

Silence is a thing conspicuous only in its absence. None of them notice the sudden quiet, or that the dirt by Ben Solo’s feet has been disturbed, as if something had been dug up. Beside the hole, the cord that had bound his hands lies, severed.

   


Blackness presses in on all sides.

Hux breathes sharply, in and out, through his nose, afraid that the darkness will invade his mouth if he opens it, the way it has his eyes and his ears. The only sounds are his own as he tries to stave off the creeping edge of panic that threatens to overtake him. The phantom taste of blood is bitter in his mouth.

The seconds before Reich drops down beside him with the lantern are the longest of his life.

Reich lands with a clatter on something brittle and sharp that cracks underneath him. Hux had felt them near his feet when he landed, but had not dared move, dared not think, in so much darkness. Now he shuffles forward slowly, towards the light, kicking aside uneven shapes.

“What the hell is this?” Reich turns in place.

“Bones,” Hux answers, his mouth dry. “They’re bones.”

In the dim orange light of the lantern, the bones gleam a dirty beige against the dark stone beneath them. They aren’t clean- some of them are stained dark, others have patches of old flesh and yellowing tendon still clinging to the joints. It looks more like an animal’s lair than a graveyard.

There is a metallic smell in the air. A slaughterhouse smell, and Hux presses his sleeve over his mouth as bile rises in the back of his throat. He knows that smell.

Most of the bones are long- limb bones, although smaller ones clatter beneath his feet like the pebbles by the river shore. Hux had known he wanted to be an soldier from the time he could walk, but his father had not neglected other areas of his education. He recognizes what is probably a human tibia from the anatomy books he used to study as a boy. Seizing Reich’s arm, he pulls the lantern in his hand closer, revealing half a rib cage, shattered at the breastbone, just beyond it.

“Jesus,” Reich breathes. “Is that human?”

“I think so,” Hux says around his sleeve.

Something dark and faintly red is smeared across the rock beneath the bones. Hux’s chest feels tight with panic. He can’t draw a full breath, can’t tear his eyes away from the shattered mess of blood and bone.

“We should-” he trails off, out of air.

Darkness hovers on all sides. Their lantern is not enough see the walls of the chamber they are in, but it feels vast. The cave is breathing here too, betraying the presence of other passages they cannot see. The space feels too large somehow, vast, immense, and he is so small within it.

Reich moves forward, taking the flickering, meagre light with him, and fear streaks up Hux’s spine like lightning.

“There’s more-”

“We should go,” Hux mutters, cold. His limbs feel weak, oddly light. He cannot suck in a full breath.

He shuffles forward, bones snapping under his boot, the sole sliding on something slick. He can’t be left in the dark.

There are more bones where Reich is pointing the lantern. Another ribcage, snapped open and beyond that a tangled mat of something dark that he thinks at first is moss on a stone, but when Reich nudges it over with his boot he realizes it’s hair, long and matted, clinging to a skull, still bearing the rotten remnants of old flesh. Red and rotten black gleams wetly in the dim light. And beyond it another-

The stone floor rises up to meet his knees and Hux vomits.

_Blood in his mouth in his stomach lukewarm blood_

“Two, four, six... Hey, how many did Ben say were in his party? Eight, right?” Reich says as Hux’s stomach spasms.

He gag, spits.   _the taste of it get it out get it out get it -_

“Eight. Why?” His voice is rough.

“There are ten skulls here.”

Something clatters in the darkness, far beyond the circle of their light. Hux scrubs at his streaming eyes, heart suddenly pounding. He climbs to his feet, trying not to touch the ground.

“What was that?”

“What?” Reich asks.

“Shh-” Hux hushes him.

Another scrabbling sound, like claws on stones. Reich picks up the musket Hux had dropped and pushes it into his hands. “Come on.”

Hands shaking, Hux follows him. He will be ashamed to say, later, that it was more for fear of being left in the dark without the lantern than out of a desire to do his duty. They approach the sound, which skitters again and then goes quiet.

The chamber that they are in narrows into a twisting tunnel, barely more than the width of his arms. Every few paces, something moves quietly in the darkness at the end of the passage.

It occurs to Hux that they are probably being lead into a trap.

After perhaps two dozen paces they reach a wide chamber, at the center of which a large piece of dark stone has been carved to resemble a throne. There is another lantern here, which has been left on a low, flat outcropping of stone across from the throne. It’s still burning. Hux stares at it, eyes wide in the darkness.

  
  
  
Waiting in the sun, with the river babbling over rocks nearby is deceptively relaxing. It's nice being out of the snow. Out of the Fort.

It is almost easy to forget why they're there.   
  
Sitting on the riverbank, his injured leg stretched out beside him, Mitaka is skipping stones across the uneven surface of the water when he hears Thanisson calling down to him from the ledge. He had left his musket propped up against a large stone nearby, not wanting to get it near the water. Captain Hux was always reminding them to take proper care of their guns.  
  
"Hey," Thanisson is frowning. "Where's Ben?"

"He's right-" Mitaka turns to point behind him, where Ben had been crouched against the stone. There's no one there.  
  
"I don't see him," Thanisson says. There's an edge of concern in his voice.   
  
Mitaka reaches behind for his musket. His hands close on nothing.  
  
"Hey, my gun's gone too," he calls back.  
  
  
  
  
  
“Mister Snoke, I presume,” Reich says, raising his revolver.

It’s then that Hux notices the man.

He’s tall, perhaps Hux’s own height, but gaunt and haggard, with a tatter of black cloth and dark furs wrapped around him like a cowl. Beneath the hood, Hux can just make out pale scars and the gleam of eyes.

He picks up the lantern. “Gentlemen. What brings you here?” His voice is deeper than Hux expected, and stronger. There is a hint of amusement in the words.

Hands trembling, Hux trains his gun on the man as he passes in front of them, unconcerned, crossing to sit on the carved seat. The lantern is set on the cold stone floor by his feet. It casts his scarred face into shadow.

Tension streaks through Hux’s veins, making him restless, jittery. He moves to the side, less nervous with stone behind his back instead of gaping open space. He keeps his musket up, pointed at the man, breathing sharply. This felt like a trap. There were too many bodies- too many, and they had seen no hint of Snoke’s deadly servant.

“Where’s your man?” Hux demands, “Where’s Ren?”

The old man laughs, slow and deep and amused. “Isn’t he with you?”

 


End file.
